Hardware-Accelerated Parallel Non-Photorealistic Volume Rendering

Non-photorealistic rendering can be used to illustrate subtle spa-tial relationships that might not be visible with more realistic ren-dering techniques. We present a parallel hardware-accelerated rendering technique, making extensive use of multi-texturing and paletted textures, for the interactive non-photorealistic visualiza-tion of scalar volume data. With this technique, we can render a 512512512 volume using non-photorealistic techniques that in-clude tone-shading, silhouettes, gradient-based enhancement, and color depth cueing, as shown in the images on the color plate, at multiple frames second. The interactivity we achieve with our method allows for the exploration of a large visualization parame-ter space for the creation of effective illustrations